These two books offer very different perspectives on a very complex problem: risk—its assessment, perception, communication, and management. How one deals with risk depends essentially on how well one understands it. Understanding in this case is itself a product or result of the efforts of many different individuals, disciplines, and experiences, no one of which is likely to be sufficient alone. History, with its attention to particular experiences situated in time and located in space, provides a realistic grounding against which other experiences—both from the past and those forecast—may be compared and measured. Political science, with its attention to powerful individuals and institutions, provides insights into the decisions, rules, and methods for allocating society's bounties and burdens. What neither provides, or provides very well, is a firm understanding, which, for a large and increasing number of risk-related problems, is something best done by those with appropriate scientific expertise.

Here's the rub: “Scientists” are often challenged by having to talk to one another, much less to historians or political scientists. Historians and political scientists are rarely interested in or competent enough to comprehend the essential sciences that describe and define the elements of risk (National Research Council, Informing Decisions in a Changing Climate, 2009; National Research Council, Science and Decisions, 2009; National Research Council, Understanding Risk: Informing Decisions in a Democratic Society, 1996; Roger A. Pielke, Jr., The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics, 2007). Each book, in its own fashion, demonstrates the matter and, in so doing, provides glimpses of needed change.

The Disaster Experts provides a history of disasters in America covering the time period from the late nineteenth to early twenty-first centuries. Three eras are identified: “Conflagration Era” (1860s–1940s), “Civil Defense Era” (1940s–1980s), and the “All-Hazards Era” (1960s–present). The importance of specific places and times is emphasized, as is the need to include numerous specialties and disciplines in the telling of the tale, as it were.

Nearly one-half of the book presents fascinating stories about fire's effects on a rapidly urbanizing America. Broad-scale fires in Chicago (1871), Boston (1872), Seattle (1889), Baltimore (1904), and San Francisco (1906) revealed vulnerabilities and prompted many political and professional responses, which Scott Gabriel Knowles spells out. It is, however, the specific instance of the Iroquois Theater fire in Chicago in 1903 that claims his attention and a good part of the book itself.

The fire took more than 600 lives, which is serious enough. But since it happened in a newly constructed “fireproof” building, the event took on extraordinary importance and helped stimulate the professional fields of fire safety, risk-based insurance, materials and product testing (e.g., Underwriters Laboratories—ULs), and the legal, regulatory, and practical responses that such new expertise and knowledge required. In a reasonable summary of the fire portion of the book (Chap. 3), Knowles highlights political, expert, and business standpoints and preferences as they interact and often conflict. The special roles of nonprofit, professional, and industry organizations and interest groups are clearly described, too.

The examination of fire disasters in the Conflagration Era is a particular strength of the book. Such disasters require “facility with chemistry and physics. Understanding fire protection in a city involves the basic science but also local geography, city planning, public policy, and much, much more. In their full complexity disasters present themselves among the most difficult interdisciplinary puzzles in the modern world, encompassing realms technical and social, private and public” (p. 12). So far, so good: real problems, real people, and real responses. This all adds up to real understanding and notable progress in dealing with risk in its many forms.

Then the book shifts gears, however, into its second of three main parts, the “Civil Defense Era,” and the story begins to blur. The threat of nuclear war resulted in many different initiatives to prevent it and, if these failed, to mitigate or adapt to its horrendous consequences. The fire theme from the first half of the book figures in the discussion of this era since Nagasaki and Hiroshima were essentially burned to the ground. Risk perception also counted heavily, as presidents from Harry Truman onward made efforts to comfort citizens and contain their fears about annihilation. For most, as Knowles points out, the very concept of Mutual Assured Destruction—MAD, as the Cold War strategy was called—was too much for most people to absorb. Keeping essential matters highly classified hardly helped. Public knowledge and understanding flagged and thus opened the way for domination of the national security expert classes—disaster experts and technical specialists among them.

At this point, the book loses focus and begins to grasp for examples near and far, relevant and not so relevant, and often not very helpful in making the main and interesting points of the overall argument. For instance, in the space of a couple of pages (pp. 226–27) we are confronted with nuclear bombs in Japan, strategic bombing in Germany (mainly), smog in a town in Pennsylvania, tornado shelters in a rural Arkansas county, a couple of National Academy of Sciences studies, and then Hiroshima and Nagasaki again. The discussion flails around, gets caught up “in the weeds” of details that, while interesting enough, do little to keep the overall flow moving in a useful direction.

The third and final “Era,” is taken up in Chapter 6, “A Nation of Hazards.” The basic argument is appealing: “In hazards research, disasters emerge as one part of a total ecology, a system of natural and human interactions made more and more dangerous with every subdivision creeping out into the flood plain, and every highway slicing a path across a fault line … [H]azards research found willing advocates in citizens and policy-makers, who by the 1970s were less and less worried about the nuclear attack that never came and more and more startled by the costs of natural and technological disasters that arrived regularly” (p. 252). The era of emergency management, and with it new and different governmental arrangements, had arrived with the creation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in 1979.

Floods, hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes and other natural disasters characterized many of the emergencies, and so a transition from the warlike Civil Defense Era to the All-Hazards one proceeded rather smoothly. FEMA, especially under the capable leadership of James Lee Witt, took shape and earned the public's trust. This all changed on September 11, 2001, and a reversion to the national security, civil defense view of disaster and emergency management occurred. That a “War on Terror” is fundamentally different from a “War on Hurricane Katrina” was prominently spotlighted by the actions of President George W. Bush and his FEMA director, “You're doing a heck of a job, Brownie” Michael Brown. The military's contributions were similarly inept (US General Accountability Office, Hurricane Katrina: Better Plans and Exercises Needed to Guide the Military's Response to Catastrophic Disasters, 2006).

The key insight Knowles leaves us with is that natural disasters serve to organize and mobilize emergency responders and disaster resources effectively. Furthermore, with the emergence of climate change as a worldwide concern and a likely cause of natural disasters, this may be most fitting (W. Neil Adger, Irene Lorenzoni, and Karen O'Brien, eds., Adapting to Climate Change: Thresholds, Values, Governance, 2009).

Coming Clean is a very different sort of book. It represents mainline, solid political science—as the more than 300 references and copious notes attest. The main point of the work is an assessment of the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) as an information-based means to reduce environmental pollutants. The authors summarize their purpose thusly: “We are interested in the mechanisms through which the program affects industry and communities, and whether and how it has helped to reduce the release of toxic chemicals and their risks to communities across the nation” (p. xii). In this case, the goal of adding to general understanding about means and methods to control risk is primarily that of requiring businesses to provide and disclose information about their operations. Whether these disclosures reduce the total pollutant burden and what the effects, including economic ones, might be are also of interest.

The study searches for patterns in several different surveys taken of a wide variety of businesses spread across the country. If information disclosure does what many proponents imagine it will and should, then improvements counted as reductions in toxic releases should be observed. Several chapters are devoted to the practical and theoretical hopes for information disclosure (Chaps. 1–2), and another focuses on the realities as the TRI developed between 1988 and 2007 (Chap. 3).

The search for general patterns and confirmation of the initial hopes for the TRI produced mixed results. Yes, there was evidence that the total toxic load was decreasing, but there was also evidence that some firms in different parts of the country were actually not improving or were even getting worse (Chaps. 5–6). “Variation” is the catchall explanation offered up to characterize the effectiveness of the TRI program: [V]ariation is both a hallmark of environmental performance at the facilities and a key signpost of the differing opinions about the TRI program, the nature of toxic chemical management, and the extent of communication between facilities and others … [T]here is wide variation in environmental performance over time across the nation's industrial facilities (and across the fifty states)” (p. 153).

Understanding how efficient and equitable the TRI program has been also proved to be elusive, despite the constant complaints from many business people and from some economists that the costs of measuring, collecting, and reporting the required data are excessive. Try as I might, I could not discover in the book any estimates of what complying with the TRI requirements cost—in total, for industry classes, or for different parts of the country. Likewise, there were at best only very general statements of the benefits attributable to the TRI (e.g, lives saved, costs avoided, or any other number of risk-based assessment measures). Nor is there compelling evidence presented that the TRI is even used or discussed very much, especially by many in the public or, for that matter, by facilities managers in “interaction with the media, with legislators, with local emergency planning committees, or with community or environmental groups” (pp. 184–85).

What we end up with (pp. 201–2, “Final Observations”) are an equivocation: “[T]he current mix of public policies does not live up to expectations”; a hunch: “We also think that information disclosure probably works best in combination with the mix of incentives and disincentives provided by other regulatory and nonregulatory programs”; and a request: “We have suggested … continuing research needs and the kinds of questions that students of environmental policy need to address in the future.”

If understanding is the key ingredient to managing risk, these “Observations” provide scant help. But both books at least point our attention to a problem of continuing importance.